Prank Wars
by Eternal Contradiction
Summary: It started with something Penny hadn't intended to be a prank and then escalated into so much more. With the tension between Sheldon and Penny, one of them has to break first.
1. Chapter 1

_**Prank Wars [1/5]  
**_

* * *

It started with something Penny hadn't intended to be a prank.

She checked before she began, she really did. She had each ingredient lined up on her counter, far more organized than she ever should be, but she didn't want to get caught without any baking powder again. The last lecture she got from Sheldon about stocking her cupboards with necessities was still ringing in her ears. Carefully, she measured each and every ingredient out, a little careless with exact measurements, but the biscuits wouldn't care if there was a little extra flour involved.

When she got to the milk she started pouring it into the measuring cup and immediately recoiled, her mouth sneering into a grimace and her eyes blinking rapidly as the stench hit her.

Tentatively, she took a whiff of the carton and quickly whipped it away from her face.

Son of a duck. The milk was definitely bad. Penny looked at the expiry date, almost expecting it to be well past due, but instead it turned out to be within the best-before timeframe. Thinking back, she could remember buying it last week, which was why it hadn't occurred to her to check to see if it was still good when she had verified there was enough for the biscuits.

And yeah, ok, so she had accidentally left it on the counter for the entirety of her early morning shift on Wednesday, but it had still felt cool to the touch when she got home eight hours later and she had checked the smell before putting it back in the fridge. It had been fine.

So really, it wasn't her fault. Maybe there was something wrong with her fridge. Maybe there was one of those airborne mould pathogen things Sheldon talked about living inside her fridge, just waiting to spoil perfectly good milk just before she needed it to bake a biscuits.

It wasn't her fault at all. She had no control over airborne mould. It wasn't like she could see it and fight it off with her baseball bat.

Sighing, Penny scurried over to her computer and Googled 'can you bake biscuits with sour milk.'

Surprisingly you could, but apparently it wasn't advisable with homogenized milk. Penny grew up in Nebraska, even she knew what homogenized milk meant. Besides, the answer she wanted was a solid 'no', so she ignored all the tips she found on how to proceed making sour milk biscuits, and focused on the fact that she could not proceed without real, nonsolidifying or sweaty feet smelling milk.

Feeling validated with what she was about to do, Penny grabbed the keys for apartment 4A and scurried across the hallway. The boys were at work for the next few hours and that was more than enough time to breach the perimeter of their apartment, steal their milk and bake biscuits. Within moments she was back in her kitchen, Sheldon's milk in her hand, measuring out two cups of milk. If she had known this was going to be another one of those times she had to steal from her neighbours in order to feed herself, she wouldn't have made a double batch with the intent to freeze half the dough, but the dry ingredients were already mixed and at this point she couldn't exactly afford to throw it all away and start over.

Living hand-to-mouth really sucked, but the shoes she bought with the money earmarked for this week's food were so worth it. They were knee high boots made with butter soft leather and framed her calves luxuriously. She'd found them for 75% off, and there was no way she could have passed up a deal that good, even if she had ended up spending over $100 in total.

So yeah, she kind of needed these biscuits for her breakfast, lunch, and probably supper for the indefinite future.

Sheldon's milk definitely felt emptier than it had when she started. She could validate stealing the occasional ounce for coffee, but he would notice this. She was going to have to fess up to her thievery and deal with the resulting lecture/strike.

Or...

Breathing through her mouth, Penny quickly measured out two cups worth of her sour milk and poured it into his milk carton. It would have been easier to put her own milk back in place of his, but Sheldon's brand was different than hers and he would know. This, well this would puzzle him but there was a good chance he would never figure out that she was the reason his milk was inexplicably bad.

Penny couldn't help but snicker as she replaced his milk back in the fridge, thinking of the resulting cleaning binge he was likely to go on now, believing those airborn mould thingies had compromised his fridge. He'd never know that it was actually her.

Foolproof.

x.x.x

Penny didn't really care about vintage video games, but Howard had lost a bet with her two weeks ago that stipulated he picked up the tab for each and every meal she joined them for until the end of the month. So for the last week, Penny made it to Thai night, Halo night, pizza night and now Chinese night.

"Penny, my lovely Penny, back for your fourth taste of the Wolozitz dating experience?"

She responded by giving him a cheesy grin. "Yes Howard, you fill me right up." She accompanied this with a suggestive wriggle of her eyebrows that had him choking on his fried rice.

When Howard got up for something to drink, Penny silent encouraged him to go for the milk but he grabbed a diet coke out of the fridge and shoved a dollar into the drink jar Leonard had implemented to support communal drinking habits. For this very reason, Penny started bringing her own bottles of water over filled with tap water.

She couldn't even afford bottled drinks. That's what her life had become.

Once she finished eating, she stuck around as the boys set up the original Zelda game. Sheldon was going on and on about how it was the original quest and puzzle game, or something like that, and the first game to include an internal battery to save data. Howard was commenting on the attractiveness of the princess, and Raj silently pretended to sword fight with thin air.

"I always found Link to be a cutie," Penny said. "Do you guys think they'll ever make a movie or a live action television show? Maybe I could be Princess Zelda."

"There's always a possibility," Leonard told her, head behind the television as he plugged in the console.

"There certainly is not," Sheldon snapped. "Princess Zelda is a statuesque woman of nobility and heritage with delicate features reminiscent of the Vulpes corsac. Penny is not. Furthermore, the Nintendo franchise has no current plans for optioning the title as either."

"Penny's plenty foxy," Howard leered, but she barely even noted that he said anything, too focused on Sheldon.

Oh, he didn't just insult her height, her face, and her lack of title. He totally did, as if the argument that she wasn't born a princess was a good one. What the heck ever. She didn't even feel bad about the milk anymore. "Ok, first of all Sheldon, I'm an actress. I could be so regal you would be kowtowing to your Queen all over the place. Secondly, bite me."

It felt good to storm off.

The next morning, Penny crawled out of bed at an ungodly time for a Saturday, just before the buttcrack of eight am, and prepared for an early morning audition. The role was for an extra on NCIS, but as her agent had told her, they were looking for someone with a Midwestern housewife look, and Penny didn't know anyone who looked more Midwestern than she did. The housewife part she wasn't too sure about, but she decided to go with a more natural makeup base to match with her patterned blouse.

Her mug of coffee was poured before she realized, duh, she didn't have any milk and apartment 4A didn't either.

Buuuut, Penny remember, Sheldon usually woke up at 6:15 on Saturdays, and if his usual behaviour was anything to go by, he probably woke Leonard up at 6:16 to go buy more milk for his early morning Doctor Who ritual. Oh yeah, she could see him doing that.

So Penny grabbed her Good Morning is an Oxymoron mug and practically crawled across the hallway.

"Good morning, Penny," Sheldon said from in front of the television.

Penny pointed her mug towards him in response, gesturing towards the slogan and almost sloshing the coffee over her arm. She expected him to comment that he didn't think she knew what oxymoron meant, or to quiz her about his sour milk, but he did neither. In fact, he was surprisingly cheerful this morning, especially for someone whose routine was likely compromised. Even on mornings where everything went perfectly, he always berated her for entering their apartment without invitation and helping herself to his milk.

Some days she did it just to annoy him, since the milk was not a shared item in the fridge and therefore he felt more ownership over it than he did the juice.

This morning, however, she found the fool in her foolproof plan. In the fridge was the exact same container of milk she had contaminated the day before, untouched. Penny hesitated, hand hovering indecisively for a second. There was no way he hadn't found the milk yet, as Sheldon did not deviate from his rituals.

She was pretty sure this was a trap.

Penny grabbed the milk out of the fridge and poured it in her coffee, schooling her expression into one of unwitting innocence. Sitting next to him, Penny placed her coffee on the table in front of her, and leaned back on the couch. "I have an audition at 10," she moaned. "Why Saturday?"

"I am assuming that is a rhetorical question."

"Yeah huh," she said. "Why do you wake up so early on a Saturday? Most people who have Saturdays off like to sleep in, but instead you wake up earlier."

Instead of giving her a long, complicated, and impassioned speech about his circadian rhythms, he simply responded, "I like the quiet."

She could kind appreciate that. Heh, who knew? There probably weren't many opportunities for Sheldon to be alone in his own apartment, what with having a roommate and their living room being the adult equivalent to the neighbourhood tree fort. "When I was living with Kurt I enjoyed the nights when he was working and I wasn't. It was relaxing," Penny agreed, nonchalantly picking her coffee up.

She had already scoped out the immediate vicinity. Sheldon was lucky the coffee table was empty, because she was terrified of accidentally ruining one of his nerdy toys or comics that didn't look special but really cost two thousand dollars. If there had been anything on the table, she probably would have spit her coffee all over him, instead.

And while Sheldon dripping coffee spit probably would have made her morning, she didn't think it would do anything for their friendship.

"Blurg," Penny choked, coffee spewing from her mouth and all over the glasstop table. "Sheldon, why did you let me drink this! The milk is bad!"

"Is it?" he asked, the epitome of innocence.

For a moment, she was fooled. Just for a moment, but then she realized he wasn't looking at her in disgust and horror like he should be considering she just spit all over his living room. Sheldon should be having an aneurism based on the lack of hygiene involved in that alone. Instead, he looked only mildly concerned, mildly angry, and mostly challenging, his brows arched ridiculously towards his hairline.

That's when she realized that this entire thing was a setup. The reason the coffee table was cleaned off? He had anticipated the possibility of her sitting here, probably as one of at least a dozen ways she could react.

It was far too early in the morning for this, but even without the coffee in her system, Penny felt her mind become alert. "You did this on purpose," she accused him. "You knew the milk was bad when I poured it into my coffee and you deliberately didn't stop me."

"You were just as aware as I was. I ran a succession of tests to determine why the milk was contaminated, thinking I would require more rigid sanitary standards, but while calculating the butterfat and protein content based on the microwave absorption technique, I noticed a discrepancy. Namely, the milk was not 2% but rather closer in consistency with skim milk, which is your preference. So I cleverly devised a plan to determine your guilt."

"Ah huh," Penny said, running her tongue over her teeth and grimacing at the horrible taste in her mouth. "How did that work out for you?"

"Fact 1: You did not ask for milk with your Kung Pao chicken."

"I've eaten that without milk."

"Yes, but the statistical likelihood of that is one in three. Fact 2: You carefully watched everyone who went to the fridge."

"I'm curious!"

"Fact 3." Sheldon continued, not even dignifying that with a response. "You hesitated before taking the milk out of the fridge this morning. Though, I must admit that you played the rest of the scene out very convincingly."

"Thank you," Penny said, giving him a small smile. "But that doesn't prove I knew anything."

"Fact 4!" Sheldon emphasized. "I have a small camera set up inside the refrigerator that begins to record when the door is opened."

"Oh."

"Yes, oh. As they say, the jig is up." He looked at her intently, his jaw tense. "And I will get my revenge. Muaha."

They stared at each other, obviously at an impasse. Penny gave him a challenging look. "If you mean that, it is so on Sheldon, and I swear this time it won't be me crying home to your mommy."

He narrowed his eyes at her. "Then it is on," he said, enunciating the words in a low, measured tone.

She stared at him for a moment, carefully placed her mug on the table and walked out. Ha, let him scour the living room clean on his own. She had an audition to go to and a prank to think up.

x.x.x.x

The issue with the milk prank, if it could even be called that, was Penny wasn't sure whose turn it was. She hadn't meant the milk thing to be any kind of joke, but she had intended to get one over on him. Of course, Sheldon just had to go be a genius freak on her and study the milk to see why it went sour. He probably saw this as her contribution to what looked like a developing war. In retaliation, he forced her into drinking it, setting up an elaborate scheme that probably had components she hadn't walked into just waiting offstage if Plan A. didn't work.

Did that count as his revenge? Or was it his turn to pull something on her? Should she even be thinking of this in terms of "turns" or was it more suitable to use a take no prisoners mentality to this, adopting a philosophy that was somewhere between her Halo strategy and how she navigated her love life.

Did she even care? Sheldon was the one who had rules about his rules. Penny was the one who broke them.

Once she got back from the audition, she immediately got on her laptop and started researching practical jokes. She saw one of two good ones, bookmarked a few she definitely was not going to use – evidence to the contrary, she wasn't entirely stupid. She knew pilfering internet from geniuses probably meant they knew when she was looking up Puck/Rachael fanfiction at three in the morning – and opened her email account.

A few months back, she had made up a friend with a drug problem and asked Sheldon for his cousin Leo's email, citing that she thought Debbie could use the support of a recovering addict.

She did this just to mess with him. She knew a hammy stage actor when she saw one. It was her vocation, after all. It was like putting a string theorist in front of Sheldon and not expecting him to recognise a fellow scientist. Of course, it had taken her a few days at the time to figure it out, but honestly, who went that far to back up a simple fib?

Besides Sheldon, of course. No normal people did.

_Heya Leo,_ she wrote.

_Thx 4 ur help w/ my friend Debbie. She rly appreciated all the info u sent 2 her and she said it was super organized 2. U must have a bit of the more crazy Dr. Cooper jeans than u thought. Neways I'm trying 2 think of a prank to pull on Sheldon. Do u have ne advice? Can u think of nething he rly hated as a kid? I've got nothing._

_Penny_

Oh man, she snickered. He was going to hate this. Jeans. Epic.

She couldn't wait to get a response. Either he was going to have to give her advice on how to prank himself, or he was going to have to fess up to the entire thing. Of course, there were other options; his surprising ability to burst out of the box when provoked was what would make this fun.

x.x.x

Penny just had enough time to go to the library before her shift at the Cheesecake Factory. She had a few ideas about generic pranks she could pull, but she wanted something amazing, something personal, that would teach him not to mess with the master. The last time they had done this, it had gotten far too personal too fast, and ended up with her underwear displayed for all the world to see and his mother's number stored on her phone.

Honestly. She called his mom and tattled. How embarrassing.

So she set herself up in the computer lab and did another search for joke ideas, this time more specific than when she searched on her computer. She thought about doing something easy like switching the sugar for salt, but 1. that would also effect Leonard, and 2. it was far too simple.

After jotting down some ideas, she shoved the piece of paper in her tampon holder, not that she thought that would stop Sheldon or even give him a pause, it just felt like something she needed to do to maintain secrecy.

Spiders, she thought. She'd put a bunch of plastic spiders between his sheets. The boys always made her kill spiders for them, and she really didn't mind. Spiders weren't too bad, it was the cobwebs that really bothered her.

Or maybe she'd take out a personal ad for him.

_Nemesis Wanted: SWM, 28, into comic books, Halo 3, and rock climbing (by day), justice, honour and vengeance (by night). Seeking arch-enemy, possibly crimelord or deformed megalomaniac. Will Wheaton need not apply_.

Actually, she didn't want him making friends. Maybe a better idea would be to make up a normal single white male looking for single white female one and post it on craigslist.

Why was this so difficult? Seriously, she was over thinking this.

With 15 minutes left before she needed to leave, she Googled Morlocks.

After work, she found herself opening the door to 4A without really thinking about it. She also found herself smiling wanly at Sheldon as he watched television and heavily sitting next to him so that he bounced as the couch jerked.

"Did I miss supper?" she asked.

"We have eaten, yes," he responded. "Though in order for one to have missed the breaking of bread, one should have been expected first."

"Ah huh," she said. "Have any leftovers?"

He shot her a look of consternation, started to turn his attention to the television and then gave her a harsher frown.

Damn, biscuits for supper again.

And then, startlingly, Sheldon nodded. "There is a takeout box in the fridge."

Penny stared at him, trying to discern his expression, his motives, anything. Sheldon did not willingly offer leftovers. If there were portions of his supper not eaten, he had it mentally earmarked for something that wasn't her stomach.

Like maybe a prank? But no, that couldn't be it. Even Sheldon wasn't enough of a mastermind to anticipate her coming to his apartment for food. Only, she did do it all the time, and the best pranks were pulled based on rituals and knowledge of the other person. And he was a freaking genius, maybe he noticed habits she didn't even know she had, like stopping by on Saturdays when there was enough time between work and going out to play.

Penny grabbed the container he mentioned and settled back beside him. She hesitated, wondering if she was giving him too much credit.

Sheldon noticed her uncertainty and smirked his quasi-normal evil-mastermind grin.

Penny ate the food, almost expecting it to be covered in hot sauce or something, but it wasn't. It was perfectly normal, and tasty. Sitting in companionable silence with him while watching reruns of Stargate SG-1 was so ordinary that she actually forgot they were at war, and she was able to relax.

"Oh hey Penny," Leonard said towards the end of the episode. "What are you doing here?"

"Watching The Fifth Race episode of Stargate."

Leonard gave her that surprised look he had, the one that said 'you aren't fitting into my world view of hot Penny.'

"I like this episode," she said defensively. "It makes me feel all tingly and proud to be human, thinking that we're one step closer to being a fifth race of really smart alien people. Especially sitting here next to Sheldon, who would probably make the Asgard step up their estimations on how long we have to evolve."

Even Sheldon looked surprise at that, but gave her that small smile hovering on the edge of his lips and the careful duck of his head that she had thought so cute that first day they met. It made her feel all tingly and proud in almost the same way, as if eliciting this response was as huge of an achievement as humans being smarter than almost the whole galaxy.

"Oh," Leonard said, pushing his glasses up his nose and puffing out his chest in an effort to look more important. Seriously, last week she had been watching a blowfish documentary on the discovery channel with Sheldon and he had pointed out that a blowfish does exactly the same thing as Leonard when feeling threatened, and now she couldn't unsee it. "How was your day," he asked, getting a can of 7-Up from the fridge.

"Fine. I had an audition that went ok. I went to my day job. I accidentally instigated a prank war with Sheldon. You know, the usual."

Leonard paused mid-step, forcibly drinking his mouthful of pop. His eyes darted back and forth between the two of them on the couch, and then back towards his bedroom.

"Don't worry about it," Penny said, waving her arm in a dismissive manner. "I have nothing planned for Sheldon tonight, and I think I would have fallen into it already if Sheldon had something planned for me in this room, so I assume you're safe."

Leonard cleared his throat. "I am uncomfortable with the number of uncertainties in that sentence."

"Don't be a baby," she said.

"Wait a minute," Leonard said. "Is that the leftover angel hair pasta with Bolognese sauce that I was saving for lunch tomorrow?"

Penny's eyes cut to Sheldon. "Sorry," she shrugged. She couldn't even count this as a prank, sadly. It was just Sheldon being Sheldon. She asked for food, and when they ordered pasta they usually shared it between the two of them, so technically it was still half his even though Leonard called dibs.

Leonard sighed and went to sit on the couch next to her. Penny didn't really know what happened next, but suddenly there was a fizzling sound, her front was soaked through, and Leonard was rolling off her lap and onto the floor, sticky soda flying everywhere.

"Oh my God," he expressed, awkwardly climbing to his feet. "Are you ok?"

Penny looked down at her work uniform, noting that she was coated in 7-Up, and then back to him, dumbfounded. "Am I ok? Are you ok? Did you hurt yourself sweetie?"

"Leonard! Leonard! Look at this mess. If I wanted a sofa covered in sticky substances, I would have bought one second hand from a frat house!"

Penny's attention whipped away from Leonard and towards Sheldon. Ok, right, he said stuff like that without realizing the double entendre meaning all the time. It always threw her for a loop though, as if things referencing sex just shouldn't come out of his mouth at all, even though he didn't even realize he was saying something referencing sex.

Plus, she was pretty sure she saw Sheldon move his foot at the last second so Leonard would faceplant on her lap.

That didn't happen, right? It didn't fit in her world view at all. It was even less likely than him saying 'sticky substances' and meaning cum.

Leonard was glaring hostilely at Sheldon, but moved towards the sink for a damp towel and Penny took this as the best time to leave. She didn't want to give Leonard an opportunity to feel her up as he tried to clean the 7-Up on her clothes.

And dammit, this meant she was going to have to do a wash tonight before her shift tomorrow. Tonight was Laundry Night, and though she wasn't opposed to doing laundry at the same time Sheldon was, she wasn't exactly in the mood to sit through a rinse cycle. She had plans for tonight that did not involve fabric softener, unless things got super freaky and she sure wasn't going there.

Penny was thinking about exactly what freaky things could be done with fabric softener as she stripped off her uniform, tossing it on her floor in a ball, and stepped into the bathroom. She was humming a Taylor Swift song under her breath as she stepped into the shower—

And screamed, batting against the sticky, clinging threads brushing against her naked skin. Her arm was coated in the stuff, and she flailed uselessly, almost jogging on spot.

"Get it off! Get it off!" she chanted in a high-pitched girly shriek. It was disgusting, and oh god it was all over her arm and brushing against her side, and almost invisible, like something out of a horror movie and WHAT WAS IT?

"Penny!" she heard Leonard call from next door, followed by what sounded like laughter.

That's when it hit her. This wasn't a real spider's web, it was something Sheldon had set up as a prank. So that bastard had tripped Leonard on purpose so she would be forced to take a shower to get the 7-Up out of her hair. He was playing dirty.

She really should have spit on him this morning. She still might the next time she saw him.

Angrily, she jerked the spray of the shower on, watching in satisfaction as the web disappeared down the drain, almost dissolving before her eyes. Narrowing her eyes on the wall that separated her bathroom from their living room, Penny slammed her fist against the wall in a succession of beats, hoping she remembered the one phrase she had bothered learning.

In the next apartment, Sheldon quickly translated, "F. U." He frowned in confusion. "FU what, Leonard?"


	2. Chapter 2

_**Chapter 2**_

* * *

The next morning Sheldon knocked on her door before eleven, but she was willing to forgive him the transgression this once considering she had to leave for work soon and was awake anyway. She was actually waiting for him to show up, knowing he was reliable that way. He finished two rounds before she managed to get to the door and had to wait for him to finish his third round of knocks before she could answer it.

Knock, knock, knock. "Penny."

"Heya Sheldon," she said, leaning against her open door with a smile on her face. "What can I do for you?"

"I have your work uniform laundered and pressed," he told her, handing her a tightly folded bundle of clothes. "In the future, I hope you will consider personal space issues and the unwritten rules of the Laundry Room before adding your soiled garments to an already established wash cycle."

"Yeah, I'll consider that," she told him with a grin.

"By the by," he continued. "If that was your rebuttal to the prank involving your shower and the proteinaceous spider silk, it was a weak attempt even for you."

"Oh, no, you can look forward to that tomorrow, once both you and Leonard leave your apartment for your day jobs, while little old me gets the day off. This was just an added bonus of revenge, like how you made me drink the sour milk."

He gave her an even, steady look. "I did not force you to consume your Coffea arabica, nor did I suggest or enforce the use of a dairy additive to your morning joe."

Morning joe, she mouthed with a smile. Really. How adorable was that? "Don't you want to know how I did it?" she asked. "Considering you never leave your wash unattended."

"I assume it was at some point during the phone conversation I had with the landlord's daughter to determine whether our refrigerator was working in optimal condition. Apparently there have been issues with the refrigerator in 3C, which was purchased at the same time and from the same company as ours. She informed me that the code of the Laundry Room could be waived just this once."

"Oh sweetie, you fell for the old 'is your fridge running? Well you better go catch it' line, didn't you?"

Sheldon stiffened. "I believe that is how the conversation ended, yes."

Penny snickered. "Doctor Sheldon Cooper? This is Isobel Catalano, the landlord's daughter. We've become aware of an issue involving the fridge from the tenants of 3C." She skipped forward a few lines, not wanting to rehash the entire thing. "Doctor Cooper, I just need to know whether your fridge is running! Yes, I'll wait. It is? Fantastic, you better go catch it then!" she finished the monologue, an American-Italian accent falling easily from her lips.

Sheldon was gaping at her, his blue eyes intense with anger and Penny couldn't help but snicker even louder. "If I wasn't so busy dumping my uniform in your washer, I would have loved to have seen your face when I ended the call. Yeah," she giggled. "I bet it looked something like that!"

"Penny," he said with long-suffering exasperation, his forearm braced against the frame of her door. "My laundry could have been stolen. It could have been soiled by any number of unsavoury things while left unattended. There are rules for a reason."

"But it wasn't unattended, Sheldon, once you left, I was there."

Incredibly, this seemed to mollify him. He was so weird sometimes.

"Thanks for bringing me my clothes before work," she said as she closed the door, ruefully shaking her head.

x.x.x

It was interesting how this time around they were still able to maintain civility with each other. There was no urgency involved, nor was there an underlying sense of anger and goading. Instead, Penny found herself enjoying Sheldon's company just as much as she usually did – part amusement, part fondness, part annoyance, and just the tiniest part attraction. Really, not even attraction, more like... awareness? No, that didn't really fit either. Bottom line, she still found their relationship paradigm unchanged by the fact they were currently trying to outdo each other with classic pranks.

Part of her, though, wanted to get something over on him that was so good, even he was impressed by her ingenuity. Sheldon might be the genius, but Penny thought she might be able to get him good. Of course, he was surprisingly adept at striking right at the heart of the matter – the cobweb prank was, after all, kind of difficult to beat.

Considering his love for the classics, she was a little worried he was going to Nair her conditioner.

After thinking about that all day while serving Cheesecake to overweight America, she sat down and wrote out a contract detailing what was off limits, namely anything work involved between the two of them. She made sure to emphasize that meant both her waitress career and acting one. For his benefit, she also added a section saying no permanent damage could be done to their worldly possessions. She thought he might appreciate the guarantee that she wasn't going to put little sad faces all over his Joker comics.

Penny signed into her email account to send it to him and found a response from Leo. She got a sudden jolt of anticipation, but put it aside long enough to send Sheldon the contract.

_Penny,_

_I can think one prank that would completely fool Sheldon. You could glue the cap on his toothpaste, shampoo and conditioner. Not being able to brush his teeth or wash his hair would drive Sheldon up the wall._

_Regards,_

_Leopold_

Ha! Penny thought, he took her bait. He came up with the least offensive joke he could come up with, something he could prepare for ahead of time by purchasing new toothpaste etc., and now he expected her to take his advice. There was a pretty good chance he would think he outsmarted her, so she could now go through with her previous prank plan without him being the wiser.

It was also kind of amusing to see Sheldon try to write an informal email that would sound like Leo, but still use 'Regards' at the end and use proper sentence structure. He was so bad at subterfuge sometimes.

Waiting the next twelve hours was excruciating, and all that time she kept expecting something to jump out at her. She carefully opened cupboards and doors to make sure there wasn't anything waiting to fall on her.

Nothing happened except Sheldon agreed to the terms of her contract. Could it be possible he was using the old psych out method as a joke of its own?

Nah, he wasn't that subtle.

When Monday morning rolled around, Penny was out of bed before her usual 11 o'clock, rushing to the store for supplies for both her practical joke idea and milk. By the time she returned home, it was well after noon and she crept into their apartment with a feeling of unease. She almost expected a booby trap of some kind to be set off when she arrived, but nothing happened and the quiet made her feel a bit uncomfortable.

First things first, she went into the bathroom and put his shampoo where he usually kept his conditioner and vice versa. At a glance, it would probably look like she went through with the whole glue idea. It was a good first step. Next she went about arranging a few small things which would help her if she wanted to execute larger pranks in the future, such as leaving a bottle of water and a box of granola bars in the coat closet.

Finally, she went into the kitchen and took all of the bags of cereal out of the boxes, switching his high fibre breakfast for a low fibre breakfast. This would obviously only work once, but it would give him the dilemma of wasting perfectly good cereal or changing his fibre intake plans for the day. Anything she could do to mess up his poop schedule was a bonus.

Finishing with that, she grabbed a bunch of similar shaped cans out of his cupboard and carefully used a razor blade from her swiss army knife to cut and peel the label off. She traded his Batman pasta for Barbie, low sodium chicken noodle soup for a can of beans and hotdogs, and for the piece de resistance, a can of sandwich meat with a can of roasted scorpions she had found at a Thailand specialty store downtown.

Yes, actual full-sized scorpions. Roasted. And considering tomorrow was mystery meat day at the cafeteria at CalTech, chances were he would be finding it sooner than later. Bonus points if he found them on Thai night.

Teehee.

Penny just finished re-gluing the incorrect labels on the cans of surprise when she accidentally dropped the glue on the ground. Swearing under her breath, she placed the cans on the shelf and bent down to retrieve the glue.

With her head resting on the knob of one of the kitchen drawers, she reached down to grab the tube of glue and survey the floor for spillage, satisfied that there wouldn't be an additional mess for her to clean before the boys returned home from work, she straightened.

Unfortunately, the glue that had apparently dripped on the drawer handle had other ideas, causing her to yelp as her roots pulled painfully at the scalp. Crap crap crap, she had just glued her head to their kitchen.

Penny shifted around restlessly, kneeling on the ground as she gingerly felt her hair to see how much of it was stuck. It was close enough to the scalp that she knew she'd have a nice little Alfalfa curl like that kid in The Little Rascals if she cut it off. She could barely get acting roles as it was, she didn't need to have bad hair on top of that.

Besides, she really didn't want to take a knife to it in this close of quarters as she was likely to take off half of her ear at this rate.

"Jesus," Penny whispered harshly, berating herself. This wasn't happening. It was not. She didn't just leave a big ol' clue as to what her prank was in the form of gluing herself to it.

Penny shifted again, trying to find an angle that didn't leave her scalp screaming in agony so she could just think for a moment.

Her knee refused to move.

"This isn't happening," she said to herself, jerking her leg. Yeah, she had definitely just glued her pants to the floor too. "I hate my life."

She thought about calling Leonard and getting him to come home, but her phone was on the kitchen island along with her purse and the cans of food.

Half an hour later she wished she had her iPod so she could watch one of the episodes of America's Next Top Model or Doctor Who she had on it.

An hour later, her knees stinging from resting on the floor, she wondered if she should just hack off her hair and worry about her ear later. She could claim it was some kind of VanGoghsian inspiration to her art as an actress or something.

Or maybe the glue would seep into her brain and give her super powers of telepathy. "Leonard?" she called out, trying it out. "Damsel in Distress SOS. I'm stuck in your kitchen."

Nothing.

"Sheldon?" she tried. He was more evolved, right? He was probably more likely to secretly have mental superpowers or superhearing that she didn't know about. He was probably a regular Clark Kent. "Please help me."

About five minutes later Sheldon casually walked into his apartment and she goggled at him, her mouth gaping open in shock.

"Sheldon!" she exclaimed. "Oh my god, did you hear me?"

He practically jumped out of his skin at the sound of her voice, whipping around with his eyes darting back and forth across the living room.

No, right, of course he didn't have superpowers, or if he did of course he would pretend he didn't so as to not let on to the fact he had superpowers. Honestly, what was she thinking? She was just so relieved to see him, tears sprung to her eyes.

"Penny, why are you kneeling on the kitchen floor?"

"Why are you here?" she asked, eyes darting around wildly as she tried to think of any excuse she could give him that wouldn't reveal that she was glued to his kitchen floor and that would also get him to go away and get Leonard in here to help her. She didn't think it was possible at this juncture. "Where's Leonard?"

"Leonard offered to drop me off before going to collect tonight's Thai food. I believe he was trying to avoid getting caught in any mischief I would be subjected to upon immediate entry to the apartment. Why are you kneeling on the kitchen floor?" he asked suspiciously.

Penny sighed. "Ok, don't laugh, but I was going to glue the cans together in your cupboard, thinking it would be a good prank, but instead I kind of glued my knee to the floor."

He was giving her that intense look he usually reserved for physics equations and episodes of Star Trek.

"And, ok, I also kind of glued my hair to the cupboard."

"Is this a joke?" he asked hesitantly.

"No! Sheldon, seriously, I'm not trying to lure you over here for any nefarious prank, I'm glued to the freaking floor."

His eyes were now skittering over her, from the cupboard, to her knees, and then between the front door and the hallway towards his bedroom. He was running the math on which he could make it to first, Penny could tell, and that wasn't fair, it wasn't fair at all. She couldn't even get up to chase after him to berate him for being such a wuss.

Then he surprised her and took one small step forward, not really entering her personal space, but just making the decision not to flee like a coward.

Penny looked up and him, and wow, he was really tall at this angle, and kind of lean. Since he was so uncomfortable, it seemed like he was stretched really taut and vibrate-y, and his chin had that stubborn tilt to it that said he was going to do this no matter what. That was a plus, she supposed, but really they had been friends for how long and he was freaking out about this?

Sighing, Penny looked down and brought the tube of glue up to hand it to him. "You can probably come up with a way to get me unstuck if you know the ingredients, right?" she asked hopefully.

Gingerly, he took the glue from her hand without his fingers touching hers. He gave it a cursory glance and then placed it on the kitchen island. "Dimethylformaldehyde," he informed her. "It is a keytone derived from propylene and an excellent solvent of most plastics and synthetic fibers, including, but not limited to, epoxies and superglue."

"Do you have any?" she asked in a new panic. God, it was going to take some kind of super chemical to get her free? That sucked, she thought he might be able to rub some peanut butter on it or something like how her mom got gum out of her hair that one time in third grade. "Like, lying around the apartment somewhere? Or maybe you can call Leonard and he could go back to CalTech and borrow some from a lab?"

"No, I do not believe we currently have any dimethylformaldehyde here," he said, that small smug smile hovering on his lips. "But you do. Acetone?"

"Acetone?" she echoed, her relief at seeing him starting to edge into annoyance.

Sheldon huffed. "Nail polish remover," he said emphatically.

"Why didn't you say so!" Penny expressed, ignoring the way his eye twitched. "Yeah, there's some in my bathroom where I keep my nail polish."

Sheldon moved over to the key bowl and started sifting through it. Penny didn't point out that her keys were sitting on the island in her bag. That would mean he would look into her bag and then all of her pranks would be ruined because that was where she had stuffed the garbage resulting from the set-up.

"Oh, it might be in my bedroom next to my nightstand." She had painted her toes the other day. "Or, you know, somewhere in my living room."

"This is the exact reason why organization is integral—"

"Blah blah blah blah," she interrupted him. "Do you have any idea how long I've been in this entirely uncomfortable position? My knee feels like it is going to fall off. You watched season one of Bones with me, I bet I'm getting like permanent damage to my kneecaps here."

"That's what I'm trying to tell you! If you just kept to an organizational system, I would be able to locate your dimethylformaldehyde and be back with it in a Flash."

"Sheldon!" Penny shrieked. "If you weren't standing there arguing with me over this, you could be over there looking for it right now!"

They glowered at each other for a moment before Sheldon moved through the door.

Oh yeah, her logic was irrefutable.

Minutes later he was back with a bottle of dimethwhatever and a package of cotton balls. He was rambling on about the chemical reaction about to take place and why, exactly, nail polish remover can soften the glue in her hair to the point of releasing its nasty grip. He saturated the cotton balls and thrusts them at her, his long reach enabling him to stand far out of the imaginary safety perimeter he kept around himself.

Taking the nail polish remover, Penny placed it against her hair. The liquid sloshed out of the cotton balls and ran down her arm, dripping onto her shirt, legs and the floor. Sheldon made a high-pitched noise of distress.

She thought it was probably one of his germ phobias coming to light, but he grabbed some paper towel and pressed it against her arm, not touching her per se, but shifting within her personal boundaries in such quick and efficient movements that she couldn't help but blink at him.

"Did you not understand when I explained the chemical makeup of dimethylformaldehyde that contact would be detrimental to the health of your optical system? I do not believe you are in the position to carry out proper irrigational procedures if that were to occur."

It took her a second to filter this through her internal dictionary and realize he was talking about the fact the she had shifted her elbow so that the drop of nail polish remover running down her arm would be above her head, and potentially could land on her face, possibly in her eye. He had moved that quickly to help her.

Penny was suddenly hit with a rush of affection for him as he hovered above her, not moving away now that he had taken the initiative to approach her himself. She smiled gratefully and shifted, her knuckles banging painfully against the cupboard.

Sheldon's need for perfection overcame his distaste for personal space and he grabbed the cotton balls from her. "Your blatant disregard for handling hazardous chemicals—" he started.

"Hazardous chemicals!" She interrupted, her brain suddenly clicking in. "Will it damage my hair?"

Sheldon shook his head and gave her his I-fear-for-your-inferior-intellect-and-the-survival-of-the-species look. "Penny," he said, slightly chiding. "You glued your hair to the cupboard of our kitchen. It is already damaged. I imagine the compounds will not react well with the hydrogen peroxide and ammonium hydroxide already present in your locks. I refer, of course, to what you call highlights."

"This is my real hair color!" Penny insisted.

"While I do not doubt you are an original blonde due to your natural coloring, the shade of the present color differs from the color of your hair when we first met."

Heh. Well, he did remember everything, but Penny wasn't sure he actually noticed stuff like that. Actually, she was pretty sure he didn't notice things like hair color, clothing, and especially facial expressions. "Well, could you, like, minimize the damage or something?" she asked, giving him her best hopeful puppy-dog eyes. Maybe he would file the expression away and understand it in another two years after he assessed it, studied similar situations in movies, and had time to decipher whether or not she looked frightened, hopeful, or hungry.

He gestured for her to move the paper towel in her hand. At first she didn't realize what he was hinting at, thinking it was one of his many ticks due to her proximity and how his fingers were lightly grazing her hair. Once her brain clicked in, a reaction she had far too often in his presence, she brought the paper towel up and wedged it between the strand of hair attached to the cupboard and her head.

Sheldon's height was definitely giving him an advantage now as he loomed over her, his feet firmly planted on the ground a few feet away. He had adopted his Spock-observing-the-alien-culture pose and was leaning forward so comically that their faces were almost touching. Slowly, Penny turned her head so that she could sense the warmth of his skin. If she was going to be stuck like this and if he was going to be such a germaphobe about it – though, a small guilty part of her admitted he was being surprisingly good about all this – then she was going to deliberately breathe on him, just to test how far and how quickly he would jump away.

Buuuut, the part of her that enjoyed egging him on really had to take a backseat here if she was going to come out of this without dead hair, so she didn't make any sudden movements or remind him of her presence in any way. In ways he made her think about her time on the farm and how she could always gain the trust of animals other people tended to lack the patience or motivation to try with. Penny just wasn't sure if she was gently coaxing him like she would a small bird or a baby whatever or if she was trying to tame him like some wild stallion.

And that was as far as she ever got in that analogy before snorting in derision, but in the back of her mind it always made more sense than it did when she openly thought about it.

Her fingers accidentally brushed across his wrist and she turned her head as he flinched, startled at the contact. Suddenly, her mouth was very close to his cheek and if he would just turn his head slightly to the left, he'd easily be kissing her. They were in a tableau for a moment, neither of them moving. Any other guy in this situation would go for it, but he didn't so she smiled at him and turned her head back to a neutral position.

"I think we're ready," he said, gingerly placing the cotton balls on the counter. His long fingers gingerly picked at her hair and she winced.

"I think you'll have to come closer, sweetie," she told him with a smile. "I'm not going to bite, I promise."

He looked startled and moved away from her so quickly she was surprised he didn't have whiplash.

"Sheldon," Penny said gently, trying her best to keep complete and utter exasperation out of her voice. "Sweetie, it's just an expression. I just meant that I won't take advantage of your proximity by doing anything... untoward. You know, something lesser species would do if you got near them, like bite or something. So why don't you come back here, I can't do this myself."

Who said she couldn't speak his language, or at least on occasion? Considering he was slowly edging back towards her, a look of complete distrust and unease on his face, as if she really were some kind of primate or vicious dog, Penny figured she had successfully coaxed him to the best of her abilities. If she hadn't, he would have stayed where he was, or possibly even left.

Finally he was close enough that she could close her eyes and almost sense the presence of another person next to her, which meant he was still maintaining a perimeter, but not greater than a foot. His fingers were in her hair again, trying to gently pull each strand out of the glue trap.

After a minute Penny was tempted to just snap her neck to the side and see if her hair would come with it or not. It wasn't so much a matter of impatience, though her knees were killing her, it was more that the position they were in was surprisingly intimate, at least for Sheldon, and she kept thinking about how nice it would be if he would pet and stroke her hair for reasons that weren't ungluing her from his kitchen. As he become intent on work, he shuffled closer and closer to her until his thigh was almost pressed against her shoulder, and heck if she wasn't _aware_ of him in ways she shouldn't be.

The urge to breathe on him was back, but it was more like an urge to blow. Not like THAT, but that stupid little part of her that always tried to push the issue around him wanted to know how he would react to her breath on his skin. Would he jump? Shiver and get goosebumps? Run away to the safety of his room? Ignore her?

Crap on a cracker, this was completely idiotic. Maybe she was the whack-a-doodle. Maybe she should get tested for the crazies.

Maybe she should just go through with it.

"Would you just hurry up and finish," she hissed, deflecting. She needed to leave now before she did something completely stupid. "My knees are killing me."

Sheldon glared at her as if to say 'be quiet lesser mortal, I am doing you a huge favour here' and went back to work. If he tugged a little too hard, well that was her fault, really.

"Ugh," she grunted when he pulled the last of her hair free with a sharp tug. She felt her head as he moved back a set, no longer almost-touching her. "Oh God, it's all in my hair."

Sheldon moved towards the sink, looking at his hands in distaste. The scent of nail polish remover was heavy in the air.

"Hold on!" she snapped at him, reaching out and grabbing the back of his pants close to his calf. He tried to shake her off, but she tugged him back towards her. "You can't leave," she told him, a little shrill. "I need help with my jeans."

x.x.x

Leonard wasn't having a good day. He had bit through his lip two nights before when he had tripped over what felt to be Sheldon's foot, but Sheldon didn't do things like deliberately sticking his foot in someone's way; so it must have been Penny? Only that didn't seem right because then why would he land on her?

Regardless, he had tripped, over what was probably his own damn foot, and fell, biting his lip in such a way that Leslie Winkle inferred that he had herpes while they were in the cafeteria lunch line. It wouldn't have been so bad if she hadn't been making not-too-subtle hints about her hormones revving up for another intimacy phase the Friday before.

So his lip hurt and his dry spell wouldn't be getting wet any time soon.

To make matters worse, Sheldon and the beautiful girl next door, who was probably the only woman in the world right now who didn't think he had a venereal disease, were in the midst of one of their legendary battles of will. Leonard couldn't even express how much he didn't want to become involved in _that_. He'd seen the contract. Not anywhere in the terms and obligations did they promise not to involve one Leonard Hofstadter, roommate/neighbour. Penny had signed away her right to call Mary Cooper, and Sheldon had tried to specify practically every item in the apartment as being off limits, including a detailed list of 547 things she wasn't allowed to touch. Penny had talked him down from that, telling him that if he didn't allow for some things then she would have to start pranking him out of the apartment building and she didn't think he wanted her to get a hobo to go hug him.

Leonard was actually impressed when Sheldon had grudgingly agreed to leave the contract at a mutual promise not to permanently damage any belongs.

It still left him feeling anxious and slightly nauseated at the idea of walking into the apartment on Sheldon's heels. Hell, he was thinking about moving in with Raj for the week, only... well, only there was the potential for hilarity at Sheldon's expense. Leonard wouldn't miss that for anything, not even his own mental health.

"Dude," Raj had said at lunch. "What happened to your lip?"

Leonard shrugged.

"I warned you not to drink after Howard," Raj continued, taking a bite of his salad. "This is so gross. How can women watch their weight for their entire lives and I can barely scarf down this salad?"

"Hey!" Howard exclaimed. "I'll have you know my last tests came back healthy. And you should be grateful women eat salads. They're so malnourished and hungry that a little alcohol goes straight to their head, and bang! Hello Mrs. Wolowitz."

"That's gross dude."

"I like my women with eating disorders."

"Eating disorders aren't healthy!" Leonard snapped. "And there are a lot of symptoms and complications that I think even you would balk at. Acne, pellagra, hair loss, scurvy, water retention, tooth loss. It makes for a bad skin, hairless, pot bellied, gummy woman. Basically you'd be having sex with Gollum."

"Heeeey," Howard said, waggling his eyebrows. "No teeth works for me."

Raj pushed away his salad. "Can we talk about something else?" he asked. "Like maybe why Sheldon hasn't said a word all lunch. He just sits there scribbling in his notebook and grinning. I think I heard him laugh a minute ago and it was creepy shit."

The three of them looked over at Sheldon.

"Oh yeah," Leonard said, giving a nervous little chuckle. "He and Penny have started another prank war."

Raj meeped and gave the desperate look of someone who needed to urinate. Howard started, turning away from Sheldon and almost fleeing from the cafeteria. "Just Penny?"

"Yeah," Leonard said. "Just Penny."

The two of them relaxed and looked at Sheldon thoughtfully. "Oh man," Howard said. "Fifty bucks says he's going to make her cry."

"You think he's going to win?" Leonard asked. "Because Penny is pretty devious and she has no problem messing with his schedules."

"What can she do that she doesn't try on a daily basis?" Howard asked. "Plus Sheldon has like no social conscience. He doesn't understand that there are just some lines you don't cross."

"They have a contract," Leonard pointed out helpfully.

"Dude," Raj said. "What did he do to make Penny angry?"

Leonard looked at Sheldon in confusion. What had he done? "Nothing that I know of. Besides, I think Penny is fighting dirty. My money is on her. She's going to make him have a breakdown."

"You accept my bet?" Howard asked, voice perking. Both he and Leonard then looked at Raj.

Raj held his hands up in front of him. "I want no part of this madness." He paused. "No part!" He paused again. "Ok, they end it amicably with no bloodshed. Metaphorical bloodshed."

Howard snorted.

"Like that will ever happen," Leonard said, looking pointedly at Sheldon, who was incapable of being wrong. Oh crap, he had just bet against the house. Chances really were that Sheldon was going to make Penny cry now that he thought about it. He wondered if they had any tissues left or if he would have to make a stop at the pharmacy on the way from picking up Thai.

After work, Leonard dropped Sheldon off before going for Thai, making sure Sheldon knew that the reason was because he feared having a bucket of water dropped on him from the top of the door frame. When he came back, Raj and Howard were hovering around the front door of the apartment, giving each other uneasy glances.

"Is she doing what I think she's doing?" Howard asked uneasily.

**_Would you just hurry up and finish. My knees are killing me._**

Leonard fumbled with the Thai food, almost causing Sheldon's mi crab and chicken satay to fall out of the bag and spill on the floor. "Wha?" he asked with a pained expression on his face. "What are they doing?"

God, this week sucked. It sucked balls. No, he wasn't going there, that was such a badly worded complaint. He didn't want to think about ball sucking when the type of images that were in his head were in his head. This week was the pits. Leonard had been pretty much intolerant to this entire battle. It started with _milk_ for god's sakes. This, though. He didn't even want to know what they were doing.

Oh yes he did. _What were they doing in there?_

"Sweet Jesus," Howard exclaimed, expression a cross between glee and horror. "I know what they're doing."

"We all know what you think they're doing," Leonard snapped.

"Know. What I know they're doing. I guess Sheldon isn't impervious to the charms of Lucky Penny after all."

"Lucky Penny?" Raj asked incredulously. "She's doing that and you call her lucky. Dude."

From inside the apartment Penny made some kind of throaty noise.

"I bet this isn't what we think it is," Leonard rationalized, putting the Thai food down next to the door and leaning so his ear was against the frame. The other two exchanged a look and hurriedly joined him.

**_Oh God, it's all in my hair._**

"What the frak."

"Oh God. Oh God. Sheldon should not be enjoying the pleasures of Penny's mouth. This is something I did not need-"

Leonard felt his stomach drop to somewhere around the Earth's lower mantle. "Shut up," he hissed.

**_Hold on. You can't leave. I need help with my jeans._**

"I should go help her." Howard's eyes were wide and terrified, belying his cocky declaration.

"The world has ended," Leonard muttered. "This can't be real. This is a nightmare of epic proportions. This is mirror world."

Suddenly, the door was being opened from the other side, and Leonard found himself stumbling forward, Penny's bare legs in his immediate vision. He rationalized that her bare legs were usually in his vision, as she usually wore those short shorts that had all of them drooling like rabid dogs. Both Howard and Raj were scrambling backwards behind him, trying to adopt poses of inconspicuous casualness. They failed.

Leonards eyes followed Penny's legs, noting that she was only wearing a pair of underwear. She looked at him, at the two other stooges in the hallway and grinned knowingly. His eyes moved between her lips and whatever that was in her hair, and oh God, he didn't want to know.

"Thanks Sheldon," she said with a flirtacious wink.

"A deep conditioner regime should restore your hair to its original order," Sheldon called out from somewhere in the kitchen.

What the heck was Sheldon doing in the kitchen, Leonard wondered. He couldn't even see him. Why was Sheldon on the kitchen floor? That was probably another question he didn't want to know the answer to.

"Bye guys, I'll be back for my Thai food as soon as possible."

They watched her go, various expressions of disbelief and discomfort on their faces. They then turned all at once to look at Sheldon, who stood from his spot in the kitchen, Penny's pants in his hands. "I need to wash my hands," he told them, walking off to the washroom.

"What the frak?" Raj questioned in a low confused whisper. "What the hell was that?"

"Who the hell was that?" Leonard corrected.

"Sheldon Cooper, PhD," Howard said with a shake of his head. "Hide your children, hide your wives."


	3. Chapter 3

_**Prank Wars**_

_Chapter 3 /5_

_**

* * *

**_

It was a little pathetic that her best prank turned out to be on herself. As far as practical jokes went, gluing someone to the floor and letting them stay stuck for hours ranked pretty high up there in terms of cleverness. The fact she didn't do it on purpose didn't matter. What did matter was the fact that her victim hadn't been Sheldon. Despite that factor, Penny wondered if she could claim the damages to her hair and her personal pride as violation of the contract.

She was pretty sure she could not.

She had time to think of these things as she sat with her best conditioner in her hair, a fine tooth comb in her hand as she carefully picked pieces of glue out of the strands. It took her a little longer than half an hour to get it all out, and by the time she had her hair washed and was dressed, she was sure her supper was cold.

She was also sure she had probably missed Sheldon finding the whoopee cushion she left under his seat.

That was regrettable, she snickered, because she had been looking forward to his startled jump and the glare he would give the couch. She also imagined the boys would find it equally as funny and she really wanted to be there.

Of course, Penny would just have to take comfort in the fact that it probably happened even if she wasn't there to witness it.

When she finally emerged from her room, hair almost back to its original state, Penny found her Thai food sitting on her dining table. For a brief moment she wondered which of the boys had put it there. By that, she mostly wondered whether Sheldon had brought it over, and if she had to worry about the safety of the food and her apartment.

The question was answered when she found a note saying _'going to the movies. Almost died when Sheldon sat on woopee cushion. You still might. Stay away from apt._' It was signed LHR, which she thought was sweet.

Penny let out a giggle of delight, slapping the note against her palm as she imagined the prank again. She just hoped it wasn't the H part of the signature who brought over the food, as she knew Howard well enough to know that he would definitely sneak a peek of her in the shower. More likely it was Leonard, who was still campaigning to get in her pants in his nice-guy-for-the-win way.

She grabbed a fork and was about to open her meal when she really considered the note and what it meant. It sounded like LHR had bailed on Sheldon again. She wondered if he was really angry at her, and for some reason she couldn't see that being the case. Thinking about this while eating her Thai, Penny realized if he was angry at her over a prank that he should have seen coming, then she was disappointed in him. The thing that had made this fun in the first place was that they still remained friends.

_LHR indicated you were angry with me. Are you?_ She texted, using real words and sentence structure so as not to push him over the deep end.

By the time she was done eating, he still hadn't replied. Penny sat down to make a few Penny Blossoms, but was too distracted by the idea that Sheldon was sulking. How was this fun if he was going to be a big baby about it? She was the only one who ever even attempted to get him out of his irrational moods, and she was pretty sure the novelty of pranking him only to then cajole him out of his bedroom would wear off quickly.

Exasperated, Penny marched over to 4A and barged in without knocking. She wasn't sure what she expected, possibly Sheldon locked in his room, or sitting in his seat of consistency, but she was sure he would shoot her his angry, hostile glare and try to blow her up with his mind. Instead, he was scribbling madly on a whiteboard, muttering to himself.

Ok, so he was working. Working was better than hating, right?

That was until she saw a sketch that looked a heck of a lot like a trebuchet.

"Uh sweetie?" she said, crossing her arms over her chest and giving him her best amused-but-firm smile. When he didn't respond, and finished writing with a flourish followed by his awful hyena laugh she tried again. "Sheldon, that's not going to work."

He looked back at her and then towards his whiteboard, staring at the equations for a minute. "Why not? I can assure you the math is sound."

"Because I've seen it," she told him mirthfully. Heck, she had no idea what it was she was seeing, but if he was going to start catapulting stuff at her, she was going to use any trick she could to avoid that one. "And if I've seen it, I can avoid it."

He looked between her and the board again, shoulders slumping in defeat. "I concede your point."

"You're thinking about this too hard," she told him. "You need to just think of something funny and go through with it. Like with the cobweb in my shower. That was funny."

"You're right," he told her, erasing the scribbling on his whiteboard with a few strong sweeps of his arm.

Great. She had just managed to get Sheldon unstuck from overthinking playing a prank. It seemed she was 0 for 2 in the whole 'don't sabotage yourself' thing.

She was perched on his end of the couch, and he slid into his seat beside her, causing her to almost jump out of her skin at his arm sliding along the side of her thigh as he sat.

What the heck was that, she wondered.

"So how did you know all that stuff about nail polish remover and conditioner?" she asked. "Besides the whole working knowledge of the universe thing. That doesn't seem like something you'd pick up from in a book."

"Penny, when you understand the chemical compounds of the world around you, determining antidotes and solubility is an easy matter." He informed her, taking his phone out of his pocket. He typed a few buttons and put it on the seat beside him.

A second later her phone vibrated in her pocket. She gave him a confused glance and retrieved it, finding a response to the question she had sent him earlier about whether he was angry with her.

_No._

She grinned at him. "Go science," she said inanely.

"I suppose you aren't remiss for asking about personal experience with the subject," he told her quietly, leaning slightly closer to her in confidence. "I've been informed that this is not a story I'm allowed to share, but considering the distance between Missy and myself at the moment, I don't believe there will be any repercussions. You'll have to keep this a secret. If any of this gets back to her, I'll know it was you."

Charmed, her heart-rate elevated for a reason she didn't want to analyse, Penny simply nodded and leaned closer. This was different from the way he usually told her something was a secret and then blabbed the secret immediately afterwards. This was Sheldon willingly sharing something about his life and it was almost startling.

"There was a space of about a month between my return from Germany and recommencing my research on twistor theory. At the time Missy had concert tickets to a band called 98 Degrees. Their sound was puerile at best with a shocking lack of harmony usually found in their a capella antecedents, but when I pointed this out to her, Missy didn't seem to care."

"I don't imagine she did," Penny said with a smile, slouching down on the arm rest so that she was on level with his face. She barely even noticed the movement, so enthralled by his story. "A fifteen year old girl would just think them hot."

"That's what Missy said," Sheldon told her with approval. "I informed her that at a temperature of 98 degrees, they had barely entered a state of pyrexia. It could simply be their thermoregulatory set-point, and therefore they would simply be warm. Furthermore, if she meant they were physically appealing, there is nothing attractive about the bacterial or viral infection a fever is indicative of."

Penny snickered. "No one ever thought it was a good band name."

"No, they may as well have called themselves Tepid or Contagious."

Penny grinned foolishly, her hand touching his arm automatically. It was the same response she had had over the last decade to men telling her jokes so she didn't immediately notice she had done it. In the back of her mind when she got a little too touchy-feely with Sheldon, she would be reminded not to have such typical responses by the way he would flinch or move away from her, going silent and reproachful so in turn it became easier for her to just not respond to him.

When he didn't move, his forearm warm beneath her palm and a small smile on his face, she realized he had been very deliberate in telling the joke and not at all unreceptive to the fact that she had enjoyed it.

This was new, she realized, and wondered if they had bypassed some kind of social barrier when he had helped her take off her pants earlier.

"I bet Missy didn't appreciate your assessment," she told him, withdrawing her hand.

"No. At the time she had been – I believe the term is bedazzling – the band's name across the front of one of her sleeveless shirts. She started to yell at me for my candour with the glue still in her hand."

"Oh no," Penny said, leaning forward, entranced by his story telling.

"Oh yes," Sheldon continued. "Needless to say, glue went everywhere and somehow my sister managed to glue my hand to her ponytail."

"That's terrible," Penny breathed. "How?"

Sheldon looked abashed for a moment. "I believe I was pulling her hair at the time."

She giggled, the sound high pitched and feminine as her lips curled in amusement. Who knew Sheldon could rock a punchline? He timed that perfectly, and she had an overwhelming urge to ruffle his hair. Her hand twitched, and she abruptly stopped laughing. Would he let her? He had been surprisingly negligent of his personal space rules tonight.

The sudden stop of her laughter broke whatever spell it was that he had been under and Penny didn't realize how close their faces had been until he whipped his head away from her, his entire body recoiling and shifting so that he was sitting on the edge of his seat, as far away from her as he could get without removing himself from the cushion.

It felt pretty much the same as the time Omaha had the huge rainstorm in the middle of the winter, making everything freeze into one solid ice rink. She had taken one step forward and slipped back two then as well, but at least then she'd figured out a system to get to the barn to check on the horses using a shuffling slide and with the help of her wool mittens. Here, she was at a loss as to how to regain footing, and honestly it would be foolish for her to try now that he was so tense.

Stiffling a sigh, Penny removed herself from the arm of the sofa and sat in the chair beside it. "As embarrassing as a love for 98 Degrees is, along with the charming bedazzling comment, I have a feeling there is more to the story than that. What happened that Missy threatened your life if you ever told?"

Sheldon looked uncomfortable for reasons that had nothing to do with her presence. Instead, he seemed to be realizing for the first time that sharing this secret might not have been the smartest thing for him to do. "Well, Missy and I spent half an hour in the shower trying to remove my hand from her person using common soaps before I made the connection between dimethylformaldehyde and nail polish remover. I had been, up to that point, insisting that we use paint thinner. Missy vehemently opposed this solution, citing the damage it would do to her hair. I imagine acetone seemed to be a more practical option in her mind, as she correlated its purpose as a beauty product as being safer for the condition of said hair."

"I won't tell anyone," she promised. Then, unable to help herself, she added, "you know, I bet the boys would be less likely to come up with theories about your 'deal' that have the word mitosis and asexual in it if you told them you showered with a hot girl at the age of 15."

"Why would I want to disabuse them of that notion?" Sheldon asked in confusion. "It has taken years to solidify their opinions on the matter. Furthermore, Penny, you know I can't lie. One of them would ask me to verify it wasn't family, and I would have to come clean."

"No pun intended?" she questioned with a grin.

"Pun?" Sheldon asked, his eyes losing focus as he mentally ran through the conversation in his heard. "Ah yes, clean; shower. But that brings up another point. I do not wish to give any mental association between my sister and a shower, particularly with Wolowitz involved. He would infer some very unsavoury things about my character, and, as they say, run with it."

"You're right, sweetie," she told him. "I was just teasing you and being silly. I never expected for you to take it seriously. You've got to lighten up a little sometimes." Dumb. Dumb. Stupid. Penny, chided herself, almost flinching the moment the words came out of her mouth.

He got that cute little line between his eyebrows that said he was frowning because he was perplexed by something. "I take everything at face value. I always mean what I say and I expect the same courtesy in return, but I also value playfulness as one of my more endearing qualities so maybe I should endeavour to be more 'light'."

"Really?" she asked, mouth opening in shock and a feeling of dread sitting heavily in her stomach at the idea of him changing.

"No," he responded bluntly. "I have put one over on you as part of our ongoing skirmish." Then he got this small smirk on his face and brought his finger up to make an invisible tally on his imaginary whiteboard.

And that was when Penny realized she was in love with Doctor Sheldon Cooper, PhD...

...Which might be the biggest joke of all.

x.x.x.x.x

My apologies for the short chapter, but isn't that just the perfect ending?


	4. Chapter 4

_**Prank Wars**_

_Chapter 4_

_

* * *

_

Penny didn't sleep well that night, clichéd as it was. Her little crush on Sheldon didn't come as a surprise to her. She'd always found him the most attractive, and had been instinctually drawn towards him the day they met. The idea had always been in the back of her mind, even as she got to know him a little bit better and realized that he didn't have any interest towards the opposite sex, the same sex, or basically any kind of sex at all.

Recently though, she'd been startled to find that though his behaviour towards her hadn't changed – and ok, he had seemed a bit more normal and possibly interested, or at least less crazy, in those first few weeks – that he did treat her slightly differently than the definition of Sheldon Cooper's deal entailed. There was nothing overt that screamed an interest in her as anything other than a friend, but he let her get away with small things he would never let anyone else do, or he would go out of his way to accommodate her, all the while lecturing on which of his set rules were currently being broken.

It had taken a while to notice the pattern, especially since LHR (an acronym she decided she liked, and mentally pronounced leer) didn't seem to note a difference in his behaviour. Her mind had thought that maybe he did the same for them, but after observing his interactions, Penny realized that he did not give them any leeway whatsoever, or at least it was so rare she couldn't compare it to the small, almost daily adjustments he made for her.

Part of her rationale told her this was just his natural way to adapt to a new friendship, but the stupid part of her that thought he was cute started to look far too deeply into these things, and so she started to push him and was surprised to find him push back. She did things he would hate to get his attention. She did him small favours, and though she never received gratitude for driving him places or picking up the correct brand of laundry detergent when she asked him if he needed anything at the store, he also did small things in return for her. It was quid quo pro.

Her interest turned into infatuation and she found herself respecting his personal space issues more than she thought she would. For Penny, touching people to connect with them was as natural as breathing, but she stopped giving him meaningless physical contact.

So when she did touch him, Penny found that she meant it and it mattered. She doubted anyone noticed the difference, let alone Sheldon who couldn't spot a social cue if it hit him over the head and screamed at him like the howler Mrs. Weasley sent Ron.

She knew, and she noticed the difference. She noticed the growing struggle not to initiate physical contact with him, the need to touch him, connect with him.

Now she knew that she felt much more than infatuation towards him, and the empty hole inside her which was filled with dread expanded. She needed the connection physical touch brought with it, even if it was just holding hands during a movie, and she knew deep down that Sheldon could never provide her with that. She had no business falling in love with Sheldon Cooper, none at all.

When she crawled out of bed after a night of barely sleeping, she had a renewed resolve. She wouldn't start treating Sheldon any differently than she had yesterday. For a while she had worried about the fact she'd have to avoid him now until the misplaced feelings of love went away, but she thought it might be easier to get over him with the constant reminder of all the reasons they couldn't work right in her face. Not that that had stopped her from actually _falling_ in love with him, but it was better than the alternative.

Plus, she didn't want to avoid him. The idea made her chest ache.

Penny wasn't one for swearing, but she was pretty much fucked.

When she opened the fridge for the last of her yogurt, eyes bleary and stomach growling uncomfortably, she didn't immediately notice the slight extra resistance the door offered until a dozen eggs toppled from the shelves on her fridge and landed on the floor with a jarring patter of breaking shells and splattering yolk. Her reflexes kicked in at the last moment and she managed to catch two of the twelve eggs before they fell on the floor.

"Son-of-a—" Penny stared at the mess in dismay, yolk running from the mess and over her clean-ish kitchen floor. There was a mound of broken shell and clumps of unbroken yolk, slowly spreading outwards, liquid draining from solid. Penny automatically took a step back, staring and unable to look away from the wreckage. If it was migrating towards her feet, it was definitely going in the other direction and spreading under the fridge as well.

She didn't even own eggs. Sheldon must have deliberately gone out and bought them for the purpose of pranking her, and Penny was a pro at the old egging trick. She knew just how difficult cleaning this mess up was going to be.

Her eyes narrowed and she came very close to crushing the two eggs left in her hand. Then she considered marching across the hallway and slamming them against his head so hard that they cracked open and dripped down his back. At 7:30 am, he was probably just emerging from the shower. It was the perfect time.

She didn't love Sheldon Cooper. She_ hated_ him.

Sighing, Penny placed the last two eggs on the counter and grabbed her paper towel, making sure to create a dam in front of the fridge first so no more than necessary got beneath it. It was such a waste of eggs, and there were people in this very apartment starving from an inability to purchase such frivolities like food. It was a travesty, really.

"Sheldon Cooper is a dead man," Penny muttered as she cleaned. Once the eggs dried they would never come up off her floor, and then they'd start to smell. It was almost tempting to leave the mess until he got so disgusted by it he took care of it himself, but as much as she could deal with uncleanliness, she wasn't really a fan of stenches.

Maybe this was his way of getting her to clean her floors.

Once the mess was cleaned and disposed of, Penny marched across the hallway, intent on telling him what she really felt.

"Good morning Penny," Leonard said, his housecoat on inside out, the collar tucked around his neck at weird angles. His eyes were bleary and judging by the amount of coffee left in the pot, he was on his second cup. He didn't even look surprised or overly concerned to see her. He didn't stare at her legs either, which told her he probably was having a worse morning than she was.

"Hey Leonard. Mind if I swipe the last of your coffee?" she asked hopefully, unable to find much sympathy for him. She was all out of that this morning.

He looked like he minded. He looked like he needed that third cup far more than she did, and giving it to her was a sacrifice along par with Hercules saving Megara in Disney's Hercules or the Doctor kissing Rose when she went all Bad Wolf during the final moments of the ninth incarnation. Unfortunately for him, Leonard was the type to make sacrifices for a pretty girl, and Penny was the type to take advantage of weaknesses like that.

She was on her second sip of coffee when Sheldon came in the room wearing that blue tshirt with the robot hands on it that she didn't understand, but it almost perfectly matched the blue tank top she owned with the splashes of color that she had just happened to throw on that morning. Oh look, they matched.

It was just a coincidence, she told the part of her amygdala or whatever it was Sheldon said controlled feelings of love. It didn't mean anything.

"Heeey," she said deliberately casually, nodding her head towards him as if to say 'what's up' like she didn't care what he answered. She was cool. She was suave.

OMFG what was wrong with her? She felt like she was back in ninth grade, trying not to let on that she was totally crushing her best friend's boyfriend, but also needed for him to acknowledge her in order for her to have a worthwhile day.

But he was so close to her, his arm almost brushing against hers after she had angled herself so his arm would possibly come into contact with hers. His eyes were clear, as they always were in the morning, even without the aid of caffeine, and _they matched_. How could her heart not be doing tiny little tap dance steps in her chest?

"Hello Penny," he said, as though finding her in his kitchen well before eleven was a normal occurrence.

"I just came by to thank you for breakfast. It was really thoughtful," she told him, unsuccessfully keeping the bite from her tone. Oh thank god, at least the spark of her personality was still hanging around, not drowned out by all the gushy feelings. Leonard looked up from where he was huddled over his coffee, glanced between the two of them and then longingly towards his bedroom before he went back to his coffee.

"Breakfast? Did you steal more than coffee this morning?"

"Nope," she told him, casually leaning against the counter. "The eggs."

He gave her a concerned look. "The eggs weren't meant for breakfast, Penny."

"I know the eggs weren't meant for breakfast Sheldon," she echoed scathingly, remembering just how furious she was with him. "But I bet the chicken who laid them didn't mean them for my kitchen floor either."

Sheldon looked startled. She could almost see him running through all the things wrong with what she just said in order to figure out which to address first.

"Sarcasm," she told him, cutting him off before he could start a diatribe it was far too early to hear. She considered letting him just so she could see how long Leonard could take it before he broke, but he gave her coffee, so she decided to go easy on him.

"Oh," Sheldon said with a nod. He poured himself cereal from the high fibre end of the spectrum and it wasn't until he frowned at the box that she remembered she had changed the bags around yesterday, long before gluing herself to his kitchen or realizing she had big ol' feelings for him. She glanced over at the bowl and noticed Lucky Charms where his granola-y flax cluster crap was supposed to be.

Penny smirked at him. Ha ha. He messed with her heart and now she was messing with his bowels.

"So you haven't actually had breakfast?" he asked, getting another bowl and checking the Lucky Charms box to see if it contained acceptable high-fibre cereal. When it did, he poured himself a bowl.

Penny gestured to him with her coffee, a similar move to the one she had made Saturday morning.

"Naturally," he said with a smirk, pouring milk into both bowls of cereal and nudging the Lucky Charms across the counter towards her.

Penny gave him a soft smile. "Thanks Sheldon," she said, grabbing the bowl and heading towards the couch. She placed the bowl on the coffee table before sitting down, not wanting to spill any milk over herself by sitting with both hands full.

She noticed an odd smile on Sheldon's face, and her heart warmed a bit at the idea that maybe he noticed how domestic they were, and how adorable it was that he hadn't freaked out when he saw the Lucky Charms and instead found a way around it that was frankly startling considering his rigid adherence to rules and schedules. She had expected a downright snit fit, but this was so, so much better. Maybe he had felt the shifting of worlds too, she thought, grinning back at him—

– and sat directly on the whoopee cushion.

Penny jumped, hot coffee sloshing over her hand and dripping to the floor. She slammed the mug onto the coffee table, not caring about rings on the glass or any such nonsense and shook her hand, hissing under her breath. There was a roaring of rage and pain in her mind, but once that cooled down, she was able to take stock of the situation. Leonard looked pained, his emotionally constipated expression of embarrassment and anxiety written all over his face, and Sheldon...

Sheldon was laughing.

It was still his strange Lamaze-class breathing exercise laughter, but it was interspersed with actual giggles and it sounded so youthful and carefree that she smiled. She didn't even think it was a reaction to her feelings for him, it was just the way not-so-crazy Doctor Sheldon Cooper sounded like a four year old who just discovered bubbles, like he was really enjoying what he was laughing at.

It was sweet. Even Leonard had stopped glowering and was grinning now. It had nothing to do with love at all.

Penny laughed along with him and sat back down, not even caring that the whoopee cushion went off again and Sheldon renewed his giggling.

"You got me," she told Sheldon. "But just remember that I got you first."

"Did you know that flatulence pranks are a long standing Star Trek tradition, having been seen in both—"

"So it's worthy of you?" Penny asked, interrupting him as she took a bite of cereal.

"Indeed," Sheldon told her with his small smile, not even lecturing her for interrupting him.

"You're not angry then?" Leonard asked, looking at her down his nose. If his glasses gave him that much trouble, Penny didn't know why he didn't just get contacts or that LASIK surgery. Especially since he gave people the idea that he was being snobbish when really he just couldn't see.

"Why would I be?" Penny asked, looking at Leonard in bewilderment. "What kind of hypocrite would that make me?"

"I told you Leonard. Penny is sensible and has a more thorough understanding of immature antics than you or I."

Apparently the only hypocrite in this room was Sheldon. "Excuse me!" she said around a mouthful of Lucky Charms. "Who has a bedroom full of comic books and dolls? Oh, I'm sorry, action figures. Who wakes up for Doctor Who at six in the morning on Saturdays but more often than not watches reruns of X-Men and Spiderman animated series instead?"

"You're excused," Sheldon said coldly. "I do not like repeating myself, but shall I remind you of the bowed Japanese bobtail cat currently embellishing approximately five items of your wardrobe? How about your collection of emotive bears?"

"I'm not denying I own that stuff," she told him hotly, biting her tongue against the need to lecture him about how the proper terms were Hello Kitty and Care Bears. Geez, it was the least he could do if she had to refer to his dolls as action figures. Especially since some of them were actual, you know, _dolls_. "I'm not denying that I'm immature, I'm saying that this is a case of the pot calling the kettle black."

"But our pots aren't black. They're inoxydable steel."

"She's saying you're being a hypocrite," Leonard supplied, pressing his fingers against his sinuses.

"But I'm not being a hypocrite Leonard." Sheldon said, turning and giving her a death glare.

Considering he didn't have any fancy words to back up his claim, Penny assumed she had won this round. She chatted with Leonard for a bit, ignoring Sheldon as he finished his breakfast in the kitchen. When he pulled his medical grade cooling container out of its storage cupboard beside the rarely-used stove, she jumped, completely forgetting about the tin of scorpions waiting for him.

"I'm going to be late for my shift!" she told Leonard, leaving her half-consumed coffee and cereal on the table. Sheldon was already annoyed at her for implying he was immature, she didn't need to aggravate it. She may as well have left him live scorpions and then poked them with a stick.

She was half way across the hall when Sheldon shrieked, the same sound he used when spiders were involved. She heard the rush of feet, and suddenly regretted not staying to see what happened.

"Leonard! Leonard! What in—"

Sheldon's voice was interrupted by Leonard screaming, somehow higher pitched and girly than Sheldon had been. He didn't seem to stop.

"Honestly Leonard," Sheldon's voice said in distain once there was silence. "Obviously this is one of Penny's pranks. Scorpions did not infest our cupboards or the canning facility—" he broke off mid-sentence. "Put that down. No, Leonard don't throw that at me. Leonard!"

"I'm sick of being scared I'm going to walk into some kind of prank!" Leonard expressed. "This is the worst week of my life, and I am including the week-long therapy session my mother gave me in order to write her paper on the debilitating effects of summer camp on children with social anxiety disorder! Clean up this mess, I'm going to go shower."

Penny grinned as she let herself into her apartment. She didn't have a shift until later in the day, but she hid out and did some beauty maintenance to her eyebrows, shaved her legs, and more or less prepared for her Tuesday night as she waited for the boys to leave for work.

Honestly, she was a little surprised neither of them had called her on the obvious lie. Everyone knew she worked Tuesday nights. Even her manager feared the consequences of Sheldon's Tuesday burger with no Penny to hand it to him. It made her job secure for the foreseeable future, at least on Tuesdays.

The extra time she had to think didn't do her any favours, as the topic weighing the heaviest on her mind was Sheldon. Give her a good financial woe any day, anything was better than realizing you were in the biggest unrequited love affair since Charlie Brown and the Little Red-Haired Girl.

A small vengeful part of her wanted the most ultimate prank to be making Dr. Cooper fall in love with the waitress. It was an amusing thought, but not one she would ever act on. Any other guy, she'd consider using her feminine wiles against him, but being insincere with Sheldon was just asking for him to turn around and run back down the rabbit hole she had been slowly coaxing him out of.

Penny almost dropped her straightening iron on her bare legs when idea struck her that manipulating feelings might be a line she wouldn't cross, but Sheldon Cooper didn't have any such moral compass. He probably wouldn't even see it as wrong, simply as another step towards winning, and he always won.

Had that been what last night had been about? Had he shared a personal childhood story with her to manipulate her feelings? Was that why she thought she might have feelings for him?

That bastard!

Then her rational side caught up and reminded her that this was Sheldon she was thinking about like he was some kind of evil mastermind genius who could influence a person's feelings intentionally.

The idea was ludicrous. The only feeling Sheldon every manipulated was anger, and she was pretty sure he didn't do it on purpose.

She didn't see him again until she was part way through her evening shift, and she served him his burger with barely a word. The way he gave her a grin that was so barely there that she wasn't sure it was an actual change in his expression at all made little butterflies try to flutter out of the cocoons in her stomach. She wasn't quite delighted by the softening of the corner of his mouth, but she wasn't unaffected either.

I love you, her mind told him, finally settling into the idea. This had nothing to do with anything that had happened over the last few days. This had been developing for a while.

"Is there anything else I can get any of you?" she asked with a smile. She meant it for Sheldon alone, but directed it at all four boys. She couldn't really be blamed if when her eyes landed on Sheldon the smile curled a little more genuinely around the edges. He would never notice.

"Has the Cheesecake Factory created a lactose free cheesecake yet?" Leonard asked.

"Nope," Penny told him, popping the 'p' and trying not to roll her eyes. A lactose free cheesecake was pretty much the same as asking for fish-free fishsticks. It was completely redundant. Leonard needed to just order the sponge cake or start taking those Lactaid pills that were supposed to help with his intolerance. "I'll put the suggestion in to my manager," she told him, feigning sympathy. "With all the vegans in California you'd think they'd be able to come up with something."

"Tell your manager I don't need it to be milk free, just made with lactose free milk. With more than 30 million affected Americans, a good percentage of your customers probably have some level of lactose intolerance, so it would be good business."

Seriously, she was starting to develop a Leonard intolerance. He was treating her like a waitress. What the heck was that?

"I'll mention that," she said brittlely. "Is there anything else?"

"Yes Penny," Howard said, leaning on the table with all the subtly of Macy's Parade balloon. "I just need to say you look enchanting this evening. Is that a new perfume? You smell delightful."

Penny waited for Howard to drop the sleazy punch line into that sentence, but he didn't. "Thanks Howard," she said uneasily and went to go check on her other customers. Tuesdays weren't busy as a general rule, but tonight was particularly dead.

Fifteen minutes later the couple at table two left, leaving a tip that rounded up to the nearest dollar of the recommended 15%. Some days, the extra few cents were greatly appreciated and considering how empty the restaurant was tonight reflected how empty her fridge was, she thought she might be able to buy a can of pasta or some ramen with the extra sixty three cents.

Oh joy.

"Hey guys," she said as she approached with their plates. "I'm about to go on my break – my required by union law break," she added, seeing Sheldon's eyes come up and scan the restaurant. "Is there anything you need?"

All the boys looked down at their meals, and then looked over at Sheldon's with various signs of unease.

"Everything is satisfactory."

Penny smiled. "Work places are off limits guys," she told them, figuring their discomfort and the way they all looked ready to dine and dash at a moment's notice was because of what happened the last time she and Sheldon were feuding. "I signed a contract and everything."

"That's too bad," Howard murmured to Raj. "It would have been hot if she turned up at Caltech as Sheldon's booty call."

Penny ignored him, as per usual. "Ok, text me if there is anything you guys need. I'll be just out back."

"Why don't you take your break with us?" Leonard asked hopefully.

Maybe because you're being Mr. Cranky Insufferable Pants today, Penny responded mentally.

"It's against company policy, sorry." But she wasn't sorry. She wasn't sorry at all.

She was even less sorry after they left and realized that Howard was the only one who left her any kind of tip. The boy might be smarmy, but at least he understood that she could so totally be bought. Leonard always thought it was too weird to leave her extra money, and only ever slipped her more when Sheldon was a big jerkwad.

Penny helped close the restaurant that evening, noticing with an internal dread that she was being given more responsibilities recently. That usually meant they were grooming her for a managerial position, and there was no way Penny wanted to be a manager at The Cheesecake Factory. Hostess maybe, bartender definitely, but assistant manager or whatever wasn't really in her cards. She was an actress, not a waitress.

So she was the only one in the parking lot when she found her car wrapped in cling wrap.

"Sonofa—" she swore, looking around the dark parking lot uneasily. She considered calling Leonard for a drive home, or taking a taxi or the bus, but her car was in perfect working order and she wasn't drunk, so there really wasn't any reason she couldn't drive it home besides the layers of plastic coating it.

Peeling plastic off a car is not as easy as it sounds. Sheldon must have done it before the sun went down, because the thin layers were fused together. She managed to cut around the driver's side door, but every time she went to pull the plastic it would simply stretch. Penny was never so grateful that she carried around her swiss army knife, even if Kurt had laughed at its bright pink shell and told her it was useless.

Penny had tried to tell him it didn't matter the size or color, but what you did with it, but Kurt never had a healthy dose of fear and respect for her junior rodeo abilities. Probably because he was the Hulk and he didn't even find Dwayne Johnson particularly intimidating. Or because he was a douche.

Either way, Kurt was too stupid to knife a line right around the perimeter of the car and then peel back the windows. He was also too stupid to keep cutting until the plastic was in manageable strips. He probably would have stayed there for hours pulling at the plastic until he accidentally suffocated himself with it. She was sure about that.

Another thing Penny was sure about was that Sheldon had not done this alone. He had help, and she knew just the three hobbits in the perfect position to help him. The only question was whether they had done it before or after they came into the restaurant, ate, and then failed to leave her a frigging tip!

Penny drove home seething. She stomped up all four floors of stairs, though she supposed that was only technically three staircases? Whatever, she stomped up them, her feet making a sharp strikes against the runner covering the steps.

She slammed her open hand against his door.

Whack, whack, whack, "Sheldon!"

Whack, whack, whack, "Sheldon!"

Whack, whack, whack, "Sheldon!"

When he didn't answer after the required three seconds, instead of knocking again, Penny jerked open the door and stomped into apartment 4A as though she owned the place. The door banged shut behind her. The sitting area was dark, the only light coming from various electrical machines and strategically placed nightlights.

She met Leonard in the hallway just as she was about to open Sheldon's bedroom door. He was still dressed in his clothes, the hallway suddenly illuminated from the light from his room.

"He's in the bathroom," he told her helpfully.

Penny shifted over a few feet and slammed her hand against the bathroom door. It wasn't as heavy as the front door so it quaked under the force of her fist.

Whack, whack, whack, "Sheldon!"

Whack, whack, whack, "Sheldon!"

Whack, whack, whack, "Sheldon Lee Cooper!"

"Penny—" Leonard said, pained. His eyes were almost bugging right out of the sockets. "You can't speak to Sheldon when he's in the bathroom. It's one of his strike-incurring rules."

Penny gave him a sharp look. "Don't get any more involved in this than you already are," she hissed at him, causing him to take a step back in shock. "Sheldon," Penny seethed through the door. "I'm going to start this conversation by stating that I am fine, but do you have any idea what you just did?"

Silence, which was what she expected. He was probably going through his own bugged-eyed panic at the moment.

"Listen up, Sheldon. I would have thought that you of all people would get this because you have a twin sister and all the allusions you've made to being bullied as a kid, but you DO NOT leave a woman alone and defenceless in a dark parking lot at night and STRAND her there for upwards to an hour in one spot trying to clean plastic wrap off an OBVIOUSLY out of commission car. Do you understand?"

At least now there was a shuffling sound coming from the bathroom, which was more than she could say for Leonard, who seemed to be frozen in spot. She wasn't sure if he was more horrified by what she was saying or the fact she was screaming it through the bathroom door at Sheldon.

"I'm not saying it wasn't a funny prank, because it was, but it's difficult to appreciate it when I was terrified at how much of a target I was every second of the forty three minutes it took me to pull enough of that shit off my car to drive it. You stupid, inconsiderate, socially retarded asshat, I could have been attacked, beaten, mugged, RAPED!"

The bathroom door flew open, revealing Sheldon standing in a clean white t-shirt and his Tuesday pyjamas. He had a towel around his neck and his hair was wet.

Hello elbows, Penny's mind got distracted, taking in the long expanse of his forearms, unobstructed by sleeves of any kind.

"You are unharmed?" he verified, ducking his head and staring at her, the intensity of his blue eyes concentrated as they took her in.

Penny couldn't do anything but nod.

"Your contention is noted; however I have to ask that you desist your attempts to register your claim of negligence through the bathroom door. You know the rules." He looked above her head, gaze zeroing in on Leonard. "Leonard, strike two for not stopping this blatant disregard for my evening ablution."

The door slammed in her face.

Penny levelled a smirk at a dumbfounded Leonard and flounced out of the apartment.

x.x.x.x.

AN: I had a nightmare last night that Shamy happened in this week's episode (The Alien Parasite Hypothesis) and seeing Sheldon kiss Amy has left me feeling all squicky. Bad brain, at least wait until the episode airs before having nightmares about it!


	5. Chapter 5

**Prank Wars**

_Chapter 5 / 5_

_

* * *

_

She had an early shift on Wednesday followed by an audition in Hollywood that had her sitting in rush hour traffic for two hours on the way back. She barely made it home on time for Halo Night. After kicking Sheldon's ass in various high graphic and gory ways, including her favourite firebomb, Penny left to go to bed, but she didn't go to sleep. There was far too much prep work to be done for her next prank, and she was far too excited to mess it up by sleeping through her grandiose plan.

At two in the morning Penny creeped into 4A, using her emergency key to get through the front door. She could feel the adrenalin coursing through her body, but she was used to denying physiological responses to excitement, fear, and anticipation. All actresses knew how to use stage fright to their advantage.

She knew to keep to the right because there was a creaky floorboard to the left that would sound her approach and wake him up immediately. She hovered indecisively next to his bed. The original plan had been to just wake him up and terrify him, but now that she was here she could see one bare foot poking out the side of his comforter. His Green Lantern nightlight was perfect for this, casting his entire room in a green glow. Sometimes she didn't even have to try.

Slowly, Penny lowered her face down to the side of his foot. This was slightly gross, but he did shower right before bed, and was so methodical about it his foot was definitely cleaner than hers. Drawing upon her junior rodeo years, Penny went into action, grabbing his leg.

Her blunt teeth pressed into the arch of his foot at the same time Sheldon bolted awake.

"DangAAAAAAH-!"

He took one look at her, his leg raised to her mouth and large plastic teeth bared at him and started screaming.

Like a girl.

"AAAAAAAAAH!" went Sheldon, trying to kick out at her. He was half-turned, clawing at his sheets as he tried to get away, but she held fast to his leg. "Don't eat me!"

Penny growled at him, low in her throat and pounced, her knees landing on either side of his hips. It had been a long time since she had to accurately judge jumping distances on a moving, thrashing, prey, but she hadn't lost the skill. Sheldon certainly had nothing on most livestock, with their ability to do serious damage to her with a single kick.

Still growling low in her throat, she was interrupted by the bedroom light suddenly turning on. Her head swung around quickly, sights narrowing in on Leonard standing in the doorway.

"What's going on guys?" he asked, blearily rubbing his eyes. He wasn't wearing his glasses.

"Flesh eating Morlock! Save yourself, Leonard, it's too late for me!"

"You mean Penny?" Leonard asked in confusion. Ok, so he was blind as a bat, but what did it say about her moisturizing routine if he couldn't tell the difference?

"Penny!" Sheldon yelled, aghast, eyes locking with hers.

"Hi Sheldon," she said with a smile, her voice muffled by the Morlock mask she wore.

Understanding had him narrowing his eyes and twisting his body beneath hers, lithe and quick as he forced her off him. Penny knew she could have dug in her knees and held on for the ride, but she allowed him to throw her off, landing on her feet by the side of the bed.

Oh God, this really hadn't been a good idea, she realized. The laugh was epic, but once again the joke was on her. She wouldn't be able to get the sight of his rumpled hair out of her head or his sensation of his narrow hips on either side of her braced shins.

Sheldon was sitting up in bed, his eyes levelling her with the most ferocious glare he'd ever given her. "Banishment is too good for this level of betrayal," he told her, voice sharp.

"Lighten up, Sheldon," she said breezily, heading out of his bedroom. When she slipped past Leonard, she stuck her face close to his and growled, feeling satisfaction at his small eep.

It wasn't until she got home that she started to laugh outright, huge guffaws that melted the stress right off her bones. _Don't eat me!_ he'd screamed. Priceless.

He was going to kill her, but it was worth it.

x.x.x.x.

It turned out Sheldon was angrier with her than she thought he'd be. When she went to join them for supper on Thursday, the door was locked against her. She almost wrenched her wrist, she was so used to it falling open under her touch on weekday nights.

"Don't bother getting the key," Sheldon called through the door. "I have barricaded against unlawful entry from the inside. You are no longer welcome here, and as soon as the locksmith answers my call, your key will no longer grant you unauthorized access."

"What's that?" Penny answered. "Are you serious?"

"I do not take banishment lightly Penny, and neither should you."

"Sheldon," Penny warned. "You don't want to do this. Isn't there some way I can make it up to you?" Not that she really cared, but sometimes you had to play along with the crazy person.

"You bit me," he said coldly. "The human bite is the most potentially disastrous type of bite wound because the abundant pathogenic oral flora could easily lead to infection. I cleansed the area thoroughly, but only time will tell. Amputation is not something you can take back for a 'do over'."

"I didn't even break skin!" she grumbled. "If I knew I was going to get in this much trouble I would have bit somewhere sexier than your foot."

"I heard that!" he snapped.

Of course he did. He heard everything. Penny gave him the middle finger, sticking her tongue out and waggled it at him through the door. She then turned and swatted her ass.

"Levity is entirely inappropriate and unwarranted for the situation," he told her, voice dripping with distain through the door. "You've degenerated into childish antics. Good day."

How the heck did he know? She wondered and then realized duh, peephole.

When she got back to her apartment she realized that if Sheldon had any say in it, he would never see her again. Of course, he didn't have any say in it whatsoever, but still, it both amused and saddened her that the last image of her he would see would be of her shaking her butt in his face. Neener Neener.

x.x.x.x

The whole situation made Penny furious. When he did something she didn't like, she had confronted him about it and told him exactly why he was a steaming pile of horse excrement. When she did something he didn't like, he banished her so that he'd never have to see her face again. Penny resented that, considering he had to see her face if he was ever going to fall as madly in love with her as she was with him.

The problem with being in love with Sheldon Cooper was when he banished you, it wasn't funny anymore, because while she was confident she could get back on his good side, a little naggling worry asked her what would happen if she didn't. What would happen if the only time she saw him was when they accidentally met in the hallway? He would likely scuttle away from her to avoid circumventing his banishment rules. She'd probably have to tackle him on the stairway and hogtie him just so he'd talk to her, and Penny was pretty sure that wouldn't put her back in his good graces.

There was no way Penny was putting up with being cut out of his life.

So she did what any sane person would do when dealing with Sheldon Cooper: she broke into his apartment while he was at work and hid in the closet.

She picked the closet because it wasn't his bedroom, and probably wouldn't push him that last fraction of an inch over the edge. She also picked it because she had already hid supplies in it, and considering the season was too warm for a jacket and there had been no forecast of rain for the week, neither Sheldon nor Leonard had a reason to even open the door.

Added bonus, there was a chance she could sneak up behind Sheldon while he was sitting in his spot and scare him.

Yeah, it probably wasn't the smartest of moves, but she was feeling a little vengeful. They had been doing so well with this little prank war that she had almost forgotten that he tended to act irrationally when someone did something against him. In fact, he had let so much go over the past week that she had started to feel special.

Penny was sitting in the closet wishing she had thought of ventilation when Sheldon came home. She knew it was him because his tread was softer than Leonard's, less draggy. Again, she realized the wrench in her plan as she sat there, listening to him bang around in the kitchen: she didn't have an actual plan.

Really, Penny thought, she should think things through better. Should she reveal herself now? Should she wait numerous hours, sit through Chinese and vintage video games and then sneak in his room again? Whenever she did it, she wanted it to be while it was just her and Sheldon, which didn't leave too many opportunities. For a man who proclaimed he didn't need people in his life, he sure liked to surround himself with company.

He was still banging away in the kitchen, which didn't seem right for Chinese night. Penny pressed her ear against the door, careful not to disturb any of the closet contents. It sounded more like he was working around the entrance to 4A.

Geez, he was changing the lock himself? Maybe adding another deadbolt? The idea had her stomach turning over in terror of losing everything and suddenly she couldn't go out there to confront him for fear of making it all worse.

Eventually the noises settled down and her pocket let out a small buzz, cell phone vibrate on the lowest setting. Penny's eyes judged whether he'd be able to see the glow of the display beneath the door crack. She also wondered if he'd be able to hear her. Sheldon might not really be a Vulcan or a superhero, but he sure did have scary accurate senses sometimes.

_I would like to negotiate the parameters of your banishment. Limited time offer, come over before Leonard gets home._

Yes! Penny thought, he was reconsidering. Then she realized Sheldon rarely if ever reconsidered things, and he certainly never made her come to him when he did so.

What was he up to?

His creepy hyperventilating laugh came from the living room.

Oh, he was definitely up to something.

Penny slipped out of the closet, the sound of the door opening covered by the sound of him banging on something else from the vicinity of the kitchen. Penny frowned, unable to see him. Why was he hiding behind the kitchen island, she wondered.

Slowly and carefully, Penny edged her way around the living room furniture, pausing with wide-eyes as she saw an overly complicated series of mechanisms placed around the front door with a huge tub dangling above it. Everything around the door had either been moved or was covered in a sheet of plastic.

This was definitely a trap. The idea heartened her a little.

Finishing the distance between them, glad she was only wearing socks so that her steps were muted, Penny rounded the island to find him crouched, his limbs all awkward angles so he looked like a starfish or something.

"Sheldon!" she barked.

He jumped away from her, feet scrambling for purchase against his clean and buffed kitchen floor. He couldn't quite stop his momentum and ended up on his ass on the wood.

"You know, if your kitchen floor was gritty like mine, you probably wouldn't have fallen," she said smugly, but reached over to lend him a hand anyway.

He resisted her offer and climbed to his feet with the aid of the kitchen counter. His eyes swivelled to the door. "How are you in here, Penny?" he asked, and then his eyes fell upon the opened closet and his gaze darkened. "You breached the apartment without permission. Banishment, nay, exile is a severe form of punishment where the guilty is forcefully expunged from the area and is explicitly refused re-entrance."

"Yeah huh," Penny responded with a shrug. "And it was usually a punishment of homicide. I know how to use Wikipedia too. It's not like I killed anyone."

"You killed my trust."

Penny made a noise of exasperation and threw up her hands. "Listen here you egotist, we're in the middle of a war and though we had a contract, you breached the contract first when you put my life in danger. That made the contract null and void, and so your bedroom was open season." She watched his face become gradually angrier the more she spoke. "Besides, you gave me permission to re-enter. The text, remember? I thought you had an eidetic memory."

Sheldon blustered and then started to rant in his high-pitched righteous tone about rules and contracts, banishment and betrayal.

Penny opened her mouth and started yelling over him, so loudly her words cancelled out what he was saying so they were basically making white noise. "Sheldon, I don't want to fight with you! This started out to be kind of fun, and don't deny it, you liked it too, but it isn't fun anymore. I don't want to be banished from this apartment. I love you, you idiot, but sometimes I can't stand you." By the end of this both of them were facing each other in front of the hallway to the back rooms and screaming so loudly that it could probably heard all the way downstairs. She grabbed the front of his shirt and was screaming into his face, but he was still ranting about something or other, gesturing wildly towards his bedroom. "Shut up. Shut up. SHUT UP!"

Then she pulled him that last inch and kissed him solidly, her mouth sharp against his. Their teeth clanked together, but she pressed harder to make sure he couldn't form any more hateful or hurtful words.

"MFFT. MRRRGGT!" he exclaimed angrily against her mouth and his hand curled around her shoulder to push her away, and instead he was suddenly adjusting the kiss, pulling away mere increments so that it became softer, gentler. She was able to slowly rub her bottom lip against his, shivering at the sensation of sparks shooting through her body, from her toes to the follicles of hair on her head.

Neither noticed the sound of heavy scraping shoe treads outside of the apartment, nor the sound of Leonard fiddling with the door knob only to find it unlocked.

They did, however, notice four litres of green goo pour on a very startled Leonard's head. The event was punctuated by Sheldon's iPod turning on, a soundtrack of maniacal laughter filling the room. Penny and Sheldon broke apart quickly, startled, guiltily, to watch slime cascade over Leonard's head as he stared at them with bug eyes. Noxious green liquid dripped onto his shoulders and all over his upper chest. He tried to open his mouth, but the slime drizzled in, causing him to make weird gasping guppy sounds.

"Oh my God!" Penny exclaimed, and then she started laughing, giggling so hard she reached out to steady herself, only the only thing close enough to her was Sheldon and he certainly wasn't any help considering he was doubled over in real genuine laughter himself. Penny slid to the floor, her fingers still clutched in his shirt.

Sheldon couldn't do anything but follow her down, but he didn't seem bothered by it. His eyes were crinkled in mirth and he was hiccupping as he tried to gather enough air to breathe.

Leonard made a sound of furious distress.

"Oh my God!" Penny said again, sliding her feet out from under her. Sheldon settled against her shoulder, clutching at his waist with one hand and the other balled into a fist at her sleeve. He didn't even seem aware of how close he was. "Too funny!"

"Leonard..." Sheldon started, but was unable to finish the thought without snorting and falling into another volley of snickers. Finally, his face straightened enough so he was able to try again. "Leonard..." he tried, but couldn't get past the first word without wheezing.

Penny thought this was one of the most hilarious, and frankly endearing, things he'd ever done. "Sheldon, his face!" she crowed.

Raj and Howard appeared behind Leonard, both taking a step backwards in revulsion at the sight of the green slime coating him.

"Are we role playing Dungeons and Dragons ooze monsters?" Howard asked with a snicker. "I claim slithering tracker because that shit is just cool."

"No man. It is obvious what this is. Leonard is Commander Vince Elliot of Space Station Gamma 3 and he just gave Green Slime a hug." At the look Howard gave him, Raj shrugged. "It was on cable."

"I'll take your obscure reference to 60s cinema and raise you the Creature from the Black Lagoon. It made the same kind of angry sounds Leonard is making right now."

Sheldon thought this was hilarious if his gasp was any indication. Penny could feel the vibrations of his amusement through her arm, and couldn't help but snicker along with him, even though she hadn't understood a word of that. What she did understand was the feeling of Sheldon's forearm sliding across her back, not quite touching but an ever real presence just on the other side of her shirt. He braced his arm against the floor so he could turn to watch his friends, still leaning slightly against her.

"Blug bluuuur?" Leonard questioned, stomping his foot and gesturing to Raj and Howard behind him.

Sheldon giggled again. "The quality of this entertainment is superior to you being the one slimed," he said, close to her ear.

"Truce?" she gasped out. She wasn't sure if she couldn't breathe out of amusement or his nearness. Everything was shifting around her in a kaleidoscope of colors and mirth, nothing quite solidifying in her mind so long as Sheldon's shoulder was pressed against hers and his words were softly spoken for her benefit alone. She couldn't help but hold her breath, anticipating the next thing he said because it would shape everything to come.

Sheldon rarely granted quarter to anyone, at least without his mother's word of law. If he did this time, it was because _he_ wanted to.

Sheldon's pause drew out. "Truce," he finally agreed.

"Epic win!" Raj's voice came from the hallway, looking between Leonard and Howard. "You both owe me fifty bucks. I told you this would end happily!"

x.x.x.x.

_Fin._

x.x.x.x.

AN: I am working on a sequel as we speak and I hope to start posting it next week. If not, **Happy Holidays**! I was only going to write a short epilogue to this, but my muse had other ideas (thanks a lot muse). Penny convinces Sheldon that they should wage a prank war against their friends/enemies. Luckily for me, the effervescent Talitha Koum stepped in as Creative Consultant and helped me figure out the pranks I couldn't quite get right in my mind. Thanks to her, the sequel is almost completed and I don't have to dither over exactly what will happen to Wil Wheaton, but just a word to the wise, do not ever start a prank war with her! She be scary.


End file.
